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“You are strong, smart, beautiful and we are hoping you will make the right decision. We miss you more that you can imagine. We are worried and we want you to think about what you have left behind. You had a bright future, so please return home.”

That was emotional plea to Amira Abase from her devastated family after they learned that the 15-year-old had got on a flight from Gatwick to Turkey with two friends Kadiza Sultana and Shamima Begum, 16 and 15, in what police think is an attempt to travel to Syria to join Islamic State as ‘jihadi brides’.

However, along with the sadness, there was also anger after it emerged that the three girls, all pupils at London’s Bethnal Green Academy, had been contacted on Twitter by Aqsa Mahmood, 20, another woman who had flown to Syria from Glasgow in 2013 to join the terror group. with the Mahmood family saying that the British intelligence services, who had been monitoring Aqsa’s account, having “serious questions to answer”.

“Sadly, despite all the government’s rhetoric on ISIS,” the Mahmood family said in a statement, “if they can’t even take basic steps to stop children leaving to join ISIS, what is the point of any new laws?”

That the radicalisation of three teenagers by a known jihadist on a major platform such as Twitter points to major flaws in the strategies being employed by Western intelligence services, with experts saying that they are being overrun by the sheer scale of extremist propaganda online.

The UK Home Office admits the problem, saying that such propaganda “can directly influence people who are vulnerable to radicalisation”. To tackle this perceived bedroom radicalisation, the Home Office say they are cooperating with social media companies and civil society groups, divulging figures that reveal the takedown of unlawful terrorist material online has almost tripled.

While the Home Office could not divulge government spending figures on the battle against online extremism, it revealed that, from 2010 to 2013, 19,000 pieces of online extremist material were removed from websites by the British government’s Counter Terrorism Internet Referral Unit (CTIRU) in comparison with 56,000 pieces since December 2013 alone, marking an almost 300% rise. Other members of the US-led coalition against ISIS are also increasing their online counter-terror efforts. Australia’s attorney general, George Brandis, announced last week that Canberra would be dedicating $18m (€12.38m) to the closure of websites and social media accounts which proliferate terrorist propaganda.

The British government is also obtaining more information from tech companies – with 194 information requests made to Twitter last year compared to 82 the year before, and 1,906 data requests to Facebook in the second half of 2013 in comparison with 2,110 in the first half of last year. Home Secretary Theresa May called on tech and social media companies to do more to prevent material being circulated on their platforms at a summit on extremism at the White House last week.

“All companies should take a zero-tolerance approach to the use of their systems by extremists,” she told the conference. “I firmly believe that they have a social responsibility to ensure that their platforms are not being abused for extremist or terrorist purposes.”

However, experts argue that, while more and more pieces of extremist material are being removed from the eyes of impressionable Brits, Britain’s security services are overwhelmed to the point that this “cat and mouse” strategy is being rendered ineffective.

While jihadists in Nigeria, Congo, the CAR, the Philippines, Syria, Iraq et al wage their bloody holy war against freedom, individual rights and the “other,” their stealth counterparts are waging the same war insidiously but just as fiercely in the West.

Islamic attacks across Africa and the Middle East are not condemned by Muslim leaders in the West. Who is in their crosshairs? Those who oppose the ideology that inspires those attacks. What are they demanding? Imposition of the blasphemy laws under the sharia — “do not offend or criticize Islam.”

Muslim gunmen storm a building in Libya and go”room to room” in their residence at 2:30 a.m. Saturday and asked for identification papers to separate Muslim workers from Christians….the gunmen handcuffed the Christians and drove away.

And this is what Yahoo News and multiple news outlets are running today without comment. These newspapers will suffer the same censorship they are demanding of us, the individual. Freedom of the press is the first casualty of the sharia.

It is stunning and stupefying. Discredited liar and Muslim extremist Fiyaz Mughal is given an extraordinary platform by the largest and most influential media outlets to promote the sharia and defame the few who dare speak of jihad and its victims.

Mughal and leading Muslims organizations in the US, UK, Canada and Australia want to destroy free speech. Going after Twitter and Facebook would essentially do that. The only place to get news the media won’t cover is here and on websites like this — Jihadwatch, The Religion of Peace, Blazing Cat Fur, Creeping Sharia, etc and YOU: YOU share these news stories on Facebook and Twitter. YOU get the word out. YOU are the soldiers in the information battlespace. YOU are fighting the great fight. Islamic supremacists knows this. They have enormous funds and fanatics pounding away at the freedom we love.

Targeting Facebook and twitter is targeting YOU.

The article is all in Islamic codespeak. “Anti-racism groups” — Islam is not a race. These are Islamic supremacist groups who mean to impose the draconian blasphemy laws of the Shariah on free societies.

Do you think this can’t happen? The UK banned Robert Spencer and me merely because we speak against jihad and sharia. It can happen and will if we don’t fight back. Look at how Facebook and Twitter are kowtowing and groveling to the discredited liar Fiyaz Mughal: “By working with community groups like Faith Matters, we aim to show people the power of counter speech and, in doing so, strike the right balance between giving people the freedom to express themselves and maintaining a safe and trusted environment.”

If two or more Muslims participate in a gang rape, is it wrong to say “Muslims commit gang rape”? The answer to that question should be obvious. The only thing that’s understated is that it’s only two. All across the world, the overwhelming – yes OVERWHELMING – amount of heinous acts are being committed by Muslims. We’re having difficulty keeping up with Muslim gang rapes taking place in just Europe alone.

Yet, Facebook and twitter are being accused of fanning the flames of Islamophobia by not censoring posts that point out atrocities and crimes committed by Muslims.

In the wake of the most recent attacks in Australia, Canada and the United States the questions surrounding sources of the radicalization is often a topic of concern. With most self starters a good portion of that radicalization is more and more being attributed to material consumed on the internet. As the world watches Daesh (ISIS, ISIL) flood social media with content one thing is very clear about the online battle with the group, we are losing!

The War on Social Media

For corporations that are being used in the proxy online war it will require a shift in how they do business. For Google, Youtube, Facebook and Twitter they simply cannot afford to have their brands associated with the extremist messages that ISIS, Jabhat al Nusra (JN) and Al Qaeda (AQ) foster. They will need to increase their ability to deal with extremist content in a much more effective method. The notion that “we rely on our users to notify us of inappropriate content” is not going to cut it moving forward. Extremist groups are deploying content to social media at a faster and faster pace, one only needs to look at the number of ISIS videos currently on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter to see that. For the vast amounts of money that each company takes in in any given year they will need to consider hiring extremism experts to proactively monitor content. ISIS, AQ and JN actively use branding in their online videos and pictures, and these companies will need to use those branding symbols to more readily identify terrorist content as they have done with child pornography and copy right infringement. From an ethical and social/corporate responsibility perspective these companies will need to do better.

This is not to say that some companies like Facebook haven’t been trying to keep up. Perhaps one of the largest battles between Facebook and ISIS has been in their attempts to crush the “Bilad al Shaam Media” pages that have had a continual presence since before the announcement of the Islamic State. The day after the Australia hostage siege Facebook removed the 100th iteration of the popular ISIS page with well over 3000 users (above) . In the same breath ISIS launched three new Bilad al Shaam sites to continue their operations on Facebook. This is a battle of persistence that will require vigilance and continuous monitoring to start to push the groups away from the larger social media companies. To some extent we have already seen this happening with groups like ISIS moving to platforms like justpaste.it and manbar.me (the Arabic version of Justpaste.it). Both sites are anonymous media hosting sites that terrorist groups have been using to host and direct users to content. Another curious trend noticed by several experts is the return to webpage based sites and chat forums like ISIS’s webpage http://www.alplatformmedia.com (below).

As has been realized by Al-Shabaab (www.al-qimmah.net) and the Taliban (www.shahamat-english.com) , if you can persist through Denial of Service (DNS) attacks by hackers and governments the worst that will happen is they will have to move servers from time to time. In fact while Canadian troops were in the process of preparing to pull out of Afghanistan in late 2012, the Taliban’s webmaster Adil Watanmal had moved all seven of the Talibans websites to a server in Vancouver, Canada (below). The site which primarily is used for propaganda was also engaged in fund raising activities, thus creating a situation where the Taliban were using Canadian servers to assist in fighting against Canadian troops. These types of blatant abuses have resulted in greater calls for internet service providers (ISP) to track and be aware of the content that is being put up on their servers.

Apps in the New Age of Terror

The creation of apps for radicalization is not new. J.M. Berger has previously pointed out how ISIS used the Dawn of Glad Tidings app on Google Play to build the fire storm of twitter support for ISIS. In his forthcoming book, ISIS: The State of Terror he outlines in detail the sophisticated social media strategy of the terror group. Other groups like the Sikh extremist group Babbar Khalsa, have also used the Google play store in the past with their launch of Babbar Khalsa Radioon Google play.

When we speak about radicalizing potential a group that seems to have gone untouched by Facebook, Twitter and Google Play with a string of social media pages and apps are those under the banner “Generation Awlaki”. Anwar al-Awlaki a highly influential al-Qaeda propagandist and recruiter who was most notoriously linked to the Fort Hood attack was killed in a US drone attack in 2011. His radical preachings however persist as both AQ and ISIS groups have sourced Awlaki in their justification for terror attacks and recruitment to violent jihad. More concerning is that his preachings have reached a cult status amongst extremists and terrorists the world over, having more followers in death than he ever did in life due to the continued growth of social media. In our analysis we were able to locate several instance of the “Generation Awlaki” brand being used on Facebook, Twitter and Google play.

Examining the users of this content you see a spectrum of individuals along all parts of the path to violent extremism, from the casually interested to the hardcore foreign fighters and terrorist members. The concern of course with these apps and sites is they put recruiters and propagandists in touch with individuals that may be vulnerable to recruitment to the group or adopting the ideological cause. This is one explanation behind the meteoric rise in foreign fighters that has been seen with ISIS coinciding with their unprecedented social media campaign.

Prevention: A Role for Everyone

Radicalization and prevention is a community issue that will more and more involve social media and the need for users and responsible corporate partners to do their part. As we are seeing the police simply do not have the resources to do it all. If we had endless budgets and resources we could follow and monitor individuals around the clock but that isn’t realistic nor sustainable. If we tackle the issue from a medical model it will mean delivering prevention techniques to those individuals at risk earlier in order to prevent the scenes that we saw recently in Ottawa and Sydney. Everyone has a role in prevention and governments at all levels will need to do more to empower the community, religious organizations and parents to recognize what radicalization looks like and methods for preventing it. At a corporate level, with respect to terrorist’s use of social media, with corporations boasting record profits and share prices the argument that they are ill equipped to deal with the problem seems like a weak one to me. It’s time they start engaging with the experts and thinking out of the box on tackling the issues and doing their part.

With the release of the Islamic State (IS) Manifesto we see the latest installment from IS’ intensive, digitally propelled Information Operations (IO) machine. The message is that Muslims are being persecuted worldwide and Islam is under attack. This is a familiar refrain and one that is being dredged up from previous conflicts for its continued effectiveness. With this production they take it to the next level by publishing a ‘fatwa’ approving the use of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) to kill as many as ten million Americans. The video issuing the speech and fatwa by this IS leader was posted on the internet in multiple languages. Of interest is the move by authorities to censor the manifesto, especially given the number of ultra-violent videos from IS showing graphic violence, already available. More important is the building theme with each IS media release, that America and the coalition are falling steadily further behind in the war of ideas.

Fatwa |ˈfätwä|noun: a ruling on a point of Islamic law given by a recognized authority.

WMD: Weapons capable of a high order of destruction and/or of being used in such a manner as to destroy large numbers of people. Weapons of mass destruction can be high explosives or nuclear, biological, chemical, and radiological weapons, but exclude the means of transporting or propelling the weapon where such means is a separable and divisible part of the weapon.

English transcripts are still available for anyone still interested in general content.

One does not need to be a subject matter expert to understand some ground truths regarding our deficit in this area, or why our Department of State (DOS) and Pentagon are consistently being outclassed by their IS counterparts. There is almost a complete dearth of information operations being conducted by our government or its agencies to dissuade the opposition and their prospective recruits. Islamic State understands the value of sending a strong core message (victory, the caliphate, jihad) to the target audience, and their IO machine is tireless in its efforts to crank out their message often and emphatically. Consider the following video, typical of their productions. Its message is clear and appeals to their audience.

By contrast our DOS operates a Twitter feed, @Thinkagainturnaway, previously covered in the ISIS Study Group piece: State Department Failure: Messaging Gaffes Miss Mark Completely. The IS makes a bold appeal to their audience and lures them using images depicting power, violence and victory over the enemies of Islam. The DOS Twitter feed responds in a fashion reminiscent of college campus politics or some hipster think tank. IS makes a video of a beheading and DOS responds by targeting them with a hash tag and a pithy phrase. In short, there is no comparison between the effectiveness of IS products and the one-trick pony that is @Thinkagainturnaway.

Dozens of Twitter accounts linked to Islamic State (IS) jihadists have been closed down by the site’s administrators in the last week after they were used to threaten the United States and post a string of grisly images.

Members of the terror organisation apparently attempted to reactivate the blocked accounts but Twitter’s staff have repeatedly closed them down again.

The accounts had been used to boast of victories in Iraq and Syria and threaten US forces.

In one particularly graphic tweet, an Australian jihadi published a photograph of his seven-year-old son holding up a severed head.

IS used other accounts to terrify Twitter users by tricking them into viewing images of corpses using innocuous hashtags such as #Hawaii.

On Wednesday, Dave Gaubatz, a former Air Force investigator and author of “Muslim Mafia,” told Examiner.com that he “infiltrated” a Muslim conference held in Detroit earlier this month. While at the conference, he reportedly spoke to a representative of a group known as Muslim Advocates, who said the organization is working “closely” with social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to close down accounts of users critical of Islam.

“They are asking these groups to close the accounts of anyone who is critical of Islam,” he said. “This is considered serious hate speech and should not be allowed on the Internet.”

According to Gaubatz, the representative also said that “anyone critical of Islam and sharia law are haters.” Ditto for those who oppose either the construction or expansion of a mosque in the United States.

“We are experts with deep experience in the courtroom and powerful connections in Congress and the White House,” Gaubatz recalled being told by the Muslim Advocates representative.

“This should be of no surprise to anyone,” Gaubatz said.

Gaubatz also said the conference, which was attended by representatives and leaders from several groups, should have been named the “U.S. Constitution and the 1st Amendment are for MB terrorists and not for American Patriots.” For four days, he said, he stayed at the same hotel as leaders from over a dozen groups that support the Muslim Brotherhood.

He reportedly met and spoke with executives from the Islamic Society of North America and the North American Islamic Trust.

“I was informed that NAIT owned several hundred million dollars of property in America, and has the funding from 400 plus Islamic Centers in America,” he added.

But Gaubatz’ report of collusion between these groups and social media sites like Facebook and Twitter present a clear danger to the fundamental right of free speech and Americans’ ability to freely express themselves online. As we have reported multiple times, Muslim activists have called for global blasphemy bans and an end to free speech in the United States, despite the clear language of the First Amendment.

Last Wednesday, we reported that one page critical of Islam — “Islam Exposed” — was yanked by Facebook after administrators received death threats. Facebook later restored the page, saying it was yanked in error.

On Wednesday, a post at the page advising visitors to avoid hateful speech was removed by Facebook for allegedly violating the site’s community standards. Facebook did not explain why the post was pulled and one administrator received a 30-day ban.

But as we have reported, Facebook routinely turns a blind eye to threats from users with Muslim-sounding names. Last August, for example, Facebook told a conservative female they could not confirm direct threats she received violated their community standards. One threat reported to Facebook was quite specific: “We will kill you.”

Ironically, Facebook has said it supports free speech and reviews all complaints equally.

We contacted both Facebook and Muslim Advocates to verify Gaubatz’ claim and received no reply as of this writing.

Update: A few hours after this article was published, Facebook falsely flagged the link as “unsafe” in what appears to be a bid to keep it from being circulated. We have reached out to Facebook, but have not received a response.

Update #2: Muslim Advocates spokesperson Fatima Khan responded with an email claiming we misquoted their representative, even though we did not. The statement relayed to us was Gaubatz’s recollection, not a direct quote from MA or any of their representatives. We specifically asked Khan about the quote, and about allegations the group is working to shut down social media accounts of those critical of Islam. Khan never responded. The article was flagged by Facebook after our contact with Khan. More on the incident can be seen here.

In this day and age, people post everything they do or think in 140 characters or less. Washington politicos are no different.

Mohamed Elibiary, a noted Islamist serving as a Senior Fellow on the Department of Homeland Security’s Advisory Council spends a lot of his time on Twitter.

In many of Elibiary’s posts, he queries why some on the right question his patriotism and whether he truly has an interest in stopping terrorists. A quick example of some of his tweets can help answer this question.

Last month Elibiary tweeted his congratulations to the Palestinians for forming a unity government between the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and Hamas:

First, Hamas is a terrorist organization – they’ve been designated as such by the State Department and everything #Snark. Hamas is an openly anti-Semitic, violent terrorist organization. They have claimed responsibility for the deaths of hundreds of innocent Israelis through the cowardly act of suicide bombing. Moreover, they have never renounced their interest in killing Jews and they still state that they will never recognize Israel.

Moreover, Hamas’ parent organization, the Muslim Brotherhood – according to their American branches own Explanatory Memorandum – has been waging a subversive “Civilization jihad” in America in an attempt at “destroying Western civilization from within.”

This is a man who helps craft America’s counter-terrorism policies. Yet he is openly excited that an organization that wants to “destroy Western civilization” decided to support the actions taken by one of their subsidiaries, which advocates killing Jews.

Increasingly, the war in the information battlespace is being waged outside the hallowed halls of the enemedia. The Islamic supremacist group Muslim Advocates has announced that its Annual Gala 2014 on May 3 will host an “onstage conversation” about “countering hate on the internet” featuring Monika Bickert, the Head of Global Policy Management for Facebook, along with Muslim Advocates’ Executive Director Farhana Khera and Hilary Shelton of the NAACP.

The key to winning this war for freedom is in the war of ideas. So the apparatuses that truth-tellers and voices of freedom including my colleagues and me use, tools such as Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin, are of cardinal importance. When news from my website AtlasShrugs.com goes viral, invariably it is Facebook that drives it.

This makes sense. Facebook is the personal bulletin board for millions of Americans, on which they share family photos, personal victories or defeats, and news that they believe to be of critical importance. So of course Atlas Shrugs news items would be trafficked there frequently. And that’s why this particular news story about Monika Bickert’s appearance at the Muslim Advocates Annual Gala, although innocuous on its face, is of grave significance.

Islamic supremacists and stealth jihadists are very aware of the ways in which voices of freedom get the word out after having been blacklisted from conventional means of communication and information dissemination. And so these well-funded savages host expensive, silly dinners, galas, and conferences full of empty praise and flattery for clueless tools like Bickert. While Bickert’s name is clearly not on the lips and minds of most Americans, she has the keys to the proverbial kingdom. She is the gatekeeper.

Who exactly is Monika Bickert? As Head of Global Policy Management for Facebook, she is Facebook’s speech police. So is it any wonder that groups like Muslim Advocates would be feting her? Muslim Advocates is an organization of Sharia enforcers, enforcers of the blasphemy laws under Sharia. According to the Investigative Project on Terrorism, in 2011 Khera wrote a letter, also signed by 57 Muslim and allied organizations, to then-Homeland Security Adviser John Brennan, demanding that he create “an interagency task force, led by the White House” to “review all counterterror trainers, so as to purge those that the Muslim organizations, which included many with Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood ties, found unacceptable.” FBI trainers such as Islamic scholar Robert Spencer were summarily dropped.

Khera also demanded that the Obama Administration:

“[P]urge all federal government training materials of biased materials”; “implement a mandatory re-training program for FBI agents, U.S. Army officers, and all federal, state and local law enforcement who have been subjected to biased training”; and more to ensure that only the message about Islam and jihad preferred by the signatories would get through to intelligence and law enforcement agents.

Counter-terror training materials were subsequently scrubbed of all mention of Islam and jihad in connection with terrorism, leaving our law enforcement agents completely unequipped to understand the foremost terror threat of our time.

Groups like these have millions of dollars and an obviously subversive mission, and for them someone like Bickert is a key player. How many of you who are reading this know exactly what I’m talking about? How many of you have been banned from Facebook for twenty-four hours for posting a jihad story or saying something that might offend Muslims? I myself have been banned numerous times for merely posting a link to a jihad article. The well-oiled machine of Islamic supremacists descends daily on Facebook and flags or reports stories that they deem unacceptable for the eyes of the Facebook user and American news consumer.

We cannot abandon Facebook or the other enormously popular social media outlets. We cannot cede the field. The freedom of speech doesn’t mean the freedom to speak in the wilderness, where no one is there to hear us. That’s not what freedom of speech is. Freedom of speech is the protection of all ideas, not just those that global jihadists deem to be Sharia-compliant.

Despite this fictional narrative about a “lucrative Islamophobia industry,” counter-jihad freedom fighters don’t have the funds to fete a tool like Bickert. Only groups like Muslim Advocates do.

These “galas” such as the one that Muslim Advocates is holding should chill you and compel you to action. Many of my colleagues, such as Anders Gravers of Stop Islamisation of Europe (SIOE) have been silenced. His personal Facebook page and organization page have been disabled, shut down, and silenced by these same supremacist cretins.

Most Americans assume that we all share a value system based on freedom and individual rights. But such an assumption can no longer be made. You can’t expect that such freedoms will be automatically protected. We have to fight every single battle. Every attack. We have to counter every hostile attack on our freedoms with an equal or more powerful response. Otherwise, make no mistake: we will lose our freedom of speech. Its continued existence is not guaranteed. Its survival depends on us.

A view of a computer screen showing a digital portrait of the Turkish prime minister and text reading “Yes we ban” in Istanbul on March 27. Turkey banned video-sharing website YouTube, having blocked Twitter a week earlier after both were used to spread audio recordings damaging to the government, local media reported.(Photo: Ozan Kose, AFP/Getty Images)

Turkey on Thursday blocked access to YouTube following its recent order banning Twitter after someone posted an audio recording in which senior Turkish officials are purportedly discussing a scheme to create a pretext for waging war on Syria.

The audio claims to be a recording of Turkey’s foreign minister, its intelligence chief and an undersecretary of foreign affairs discussing plans to stage attacks on Turkey from Syrian soil to justify waging a counterattack on Syria, says Ilhan Tanir of the Turkish Daily Today’s Zaman in Istanbul.

The Turkish foreign ministry said the recording had been manipulated, but at a rally in the southeastern city of Diyarbakir on Thursday, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan appeared to confirm the leak was genuine, according to the BBC.

“They even leaked a national security meeting,” he said. “This is villainous, this is dishonesty. … Who are you serving by doing audio surveillance of such an important meeting?”

The YouTube blockage caused an uproar across Turkey, with most newspapers carrying the news at the top of their Web pages.

A telecommunications authority Web page gave the following information for YouTube.com: “After technical analysis and legal consideration based on the law, an administrative measure has been taken for this website.”

In an e-mailed statement from Google Inc., which owns YouTube, spokeswoman Abbi Tatton said the company had seen reports that some users in Turkey weren’t able to access YouTube.

“There is no technical issue on our side and we’re looking into the situation,” she said.

The move came a day after a court in Turkey’s capital, Ankara, said the government could not continue a ban it imposed on Twitter last week. Many Turkish users found ways to access Twitter despite the ban.

Erdogan had ordered Twitter blocked March 20, after the microblogging site refused to suspend anonymous accounts that linked to alleged recordings of Erdogan and his son talking about hiding money from police on a day of raids during a corruption investigation.

Erdogan called the recordings false and an invasion of privacy, and has said that the ban on Twitter could be extended to YouTube and Facebook.

The leak comes three days before elections Sunday for local offices, a referendum on Erdogan’s rule that could hurt his governing coalition if his party preforms badly.

YouTube was blocked about two or three hours after the audio appeared on an anonymous YouTube account, revealed publicly via Twitter, Tanir said.

The video contains audio and written text of a conversation that was allegedly recorded in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ building between intelligence chief Hakan Fidan, army deputy chief of staff Yasar Guler, Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu and Foreign Ministry Undersecretary Feridun Sinirlioglu.

Those talking discuss several options on what to do “if they wanted to create a reason to wage” war on Syria, Tanir said. Those recorded also talked aboutplans for a potential no-fly zone over Syria distributed by U.S. officials.

Well into the new millennium, radical Islamist propaganda has found a popular platform for terror groups to disseminate their messages with relative ease, while reaching out to a wider audience than they ever could before.

This has been accomplished through access to the Web, initially by establishing networks and platforms designed for purposes that range from propaganda and news to recruiting new operatives, planning, and exchange of ideas, whilst limiting access by password restriction.

In the wake of flourishing jihadi use of the Internet, considerable effort has been invested by security agencies around the world to thwart this trend, only to yield a counter-productive result by prompting the mushrooming of multiple new outlets for every forum blocked.

In recent years, this issue has developed and evolved at a far greater rate, owing to social media platforms that enable any hardline Islamist or extremist to become a virtual activist, irrespective of hierarchy or organization. Nonetheless, jihadists who have realized the great potential of social media as a prominent and rapid means of spreading propaganda for a multitude of sympathizers, supporters, and would-be jihadists are now utilizing these platforms to reach out and target a new audience.

This new target population includes neutrals and Westerners seeking extreme adventures and experiences.

To this end, this article presents an examination of expanded jihadi activism on Twitter, and highlights the tardy U.S. efforts to counter this trend, specifically with regards to addressing Muslims in the West.

Senior Jihadists Join Twitter, Forum Members Follow Suit

Between late 2012 and early 2013, notable jihadi discussions were observed on al-Qaeda (AQ) affiliated password-protected forums regarding the importance of the online media battlefield and the emphasis on the risks inherent in its use.

Additionally, a general abatement in the participation of activists on these forums was discerned, prompting top AQ ideologue Abu Saad al-Amili to pen an essay lamenting the decline and calling upon the “soldiers of the jihadi media” to return to their (virtual) arenas.

One of Amili’s social media columns

In the essay, titled “Appeal to the Media Soldiers of Jihad: Maintain your Positions and Return to your Enclaves,” al-Amili attributed the shrinking activity on jihadi forums to the migration of members into such social media networks as Facebook and Twitter.

al-Amili’s Twitter account

Although himself a Twitter activist (@al3aamili), in his article al-Amili attempts to motivate members to remain active on the forums. Yet, the fact that he, together with top AQ brass, has become a prominent Twitter user appears to have encouraged forum members to “migrate” to Twitter en masse instead of “maintaining their position” elsewhere.

Twitter as an Instant Relay for Booming Jihadi Activities

Serious jihadi activism on Twitter floundered for some time before eventually taking off and developing into a full-fledged propaganda arena, massively utilized by senior jihadists, actual fighters on the battlefield, and media jihadists alike.

This trend has also swept the once-wary jihadi platforms that until recently complained about losing members to the open Internet sphere. Nowadays, the majority of jihadi forums and platforms have official and unofficial Twitter accounts, most of which advertise these accounts on their main page.

The intensification of the armed conflict in Syria, where jihadists and AQ-splinter groups have flooded in from around the globe to successfully establish strongholds in various parts of the country, precipitated an expansion of war efforts to social media.

It is in this conflict that Twitter has become the ultimate intersection for jihadi propaganda and activism, where actual fighters and their followers publish first-hand statements and accounts in addition to uploading raw footage from the battlefront. Foreign jihadists who “migrated” from Western countries to Syria greatly contributed to the rise of this phenomenon, as they regularly update their friends, family, and followers on their well-being, as well as on their “holy war adventures.”

Turkey’s membership in NATO should be on the table. The NATO website says, “NATO promotes democratic values and encourages consultation and cooperation on defense and security issues to build trust and, in the long run, prevent conflict.”

BY RYAN MAURO:

The so-called “moderate” Islamist government of Turkey, led by Prime Minister Erdogan, exhibited its undemocratic tendencies again, this time by blocking Twitter. The move came after Erdogan vowed to “wipe out” the social media network that is used by 10 million Turks.

The restriction on free speech and flow of information fulfilled a pledge Erdogan made a day earlier. Twitter refused Erdogan’s demands to censor certain links, so the Turkish government got permission from a court to stop the population from using the website.

“We now have a court order. We’ll eradicate Twitter. I don’t care what the international community says. Everyone will witness the power of the Turkish Republic,” he declared.

In its official blog, the U.S. State Department called the censorship “21st Century book-burning.” Chiding Erdogan, the blog argued, “[Censorship] doesn’t make anyone stronger. This brand of suppression affects all of us: In an era in which the Internet serves as the world’s community forum, censorship anywhere is a threat to freedom of speech everywhere.”

Yet in an indication of the soft-balled response we can expect from the U.S., the blog continued in a conciliatory tone, saying, “Sometimes even our friends make this mistake,” and confessed that, “The United States’ history on freedom of expression has …slipped at times.”

Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, tweeted: “The freedom to speak out and to connect is a fundamental right. The people of Turkey deserve that right restored.” Britain, Germany, Canada and a number of other nations all voiced their objections to the censorship.

Since the court order went into effect, when Turks try to access Twitter, a message pops up from the Turkish official that oversees telecommunication.

When Turkey joined the alliance in 1952, it was a different country. Now, it is run by an Islamist government that is supportive of Hamas, Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood. It clamps down on the democratic values that NATO says it exists to promote.

Turkey came to this point incrementally, in accordance with the Islamist doctrine of gradualism. At first, the 2002 election victory of Erdogan’s party was hailed as a potential move towards democracy. As Turkey became increasingly hostile to the West’s interests, the West dismissed these hostilities as manageable differences between like-minded allies.

The change Turkey underwent from 2002 to 2014 isn’t only a lesson about Erdogan and his supporters. This is the gradualist doctrine in action.

A daylong Georgetown University conference on Egypt’s political state in the wake of July’s ouster of Islamist President Mohamed Morsi was to include a member of Egypt’s Nazi Party.

Hosted and organized by the school’s Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal Center for Christian Muslim Understanding, the Dec. 5 program is entitled “Egypt and the Struggle for Democracy.” The lone Coptic Christian invited, Ramy Jan, is part of Egypt’s small Nazi Party and sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood, theWashington Free Beaconreports.

Jan is listed representing “Christians Against the Coup” in a promotional flier for the event posted by Georgetown Tuesday morning. He is omitted from an updated flierposted six hours later. In between the two, Jan’s Nazi ideology was exposed in a Twitter post by Hudson Institute Fellow Samuel Tadros.

“It’s remarkable to find such a guy,” Tadros told the Beacon. “Just by inviting him that tells us something about the nature of the conference and those organizing it.”

In addition, Eric Trager, a Washington Institute on Near East Policy fellow who specializes in Egyptian politics and the Muslim Brotherhood, wrote that it also was odd to see the only Coptic speaker on the program be someone opposed to Morsi’s ouster. This “suggests [the conference’s] goal is advocacy, not analysis,” he wrote.

Egyptian Copts overwhelmingly supported Morsi’s removal after he sought to entrench Islamist political power and failed to protect minority rights. The Christian minority has been targeted for a barrage of attacks by Islamists since the government was toppled.

Dalia Mogahed, a former White House advisor and protégé of the Georgetown center’s director John Esposito, wrote that Jan’s invitation “had already been handled” before the Twitter attention and that he would not be attending the event. Mogahed is scheduled to speak at the event.

The decision to change the program appears to be limited to Jan’s inclusion. The rest of the speakers, the Beacon reported, are all pro-Muslim Brotherhood. That includes a senior member of the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice political party and a former senior adviser to Morsi. U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., who has enjoyed close relationships with American Islamist groups, is scheduled to give the keynote address.

Social media giants Facebook and Twitter are grappling with terrorists who are moving from websites to microblogs as a way to spread propaganda, recruit members, and communicate.

U.S. officials familiar with efforts to monitor social media say Islamist terrorists have increased their use of social media in recent months.

Currently, numerous U.S. and allied intelligence agencies are engaged in large-scale efforts to monitor online activities by Islamists, jihadists, and terrorists.

Based on those agencies’ reports, the intelligence services are having a difficult time balancing the need to keep track of terrorist group members and their statements when the Twitter and Facebook accounts are shut down for advocating violence or otherwise promoting illegal activities.

On the one hand, spy agencies want social media to allow some of the terrorists’ Twitter and Facebook accounts to remain open to keep tabs on them. The postings often can provide clues to online friends’ and followers’ locations and in some cases they can be traced electronically.

In most cases, terrorists’ accounts that are closed or suspended for advocating violence are quickly re-opened using slightly different names.

But problems arise when social media accounts used by terrorists are taken offline, complicating real-time intelligence monitoring. In many cases it takes up to 18 hours to locate the new accounts that reappear under new names.

“They often come to us and say ‘do not take down these accounts,’” one social media executive said of the U.S. government.

The problem of counterterrorism monitoring of social media took center stage last month during the attack by the Somali al Qaeda Al Shabaab on the Westgate mall in Nairobi, Kenya. In the midst of the deadly attack, which killed 68 shoppers and storekeepers, Al Shabaab opened multiple Twitter accounts, each replacing one that was deactivated by the site.

In all, the group operated seven Twitter accounts that were closed before another was opened.

The social media communications by Al Shabaab were the first time a terrorist group made public statements during an ongoing attack. The messages by the group were mainly propaganda statements explaining the goals of the attack. But all were closely followed by international news media and security services for clues to the group’s plans and operations.

The unusual comment came in an email exchange in which Klein had asked Elibiary to comment on a recent tweet in which he warned the tea party against attempting to change the U.S. political landscape through “Christianist Xenophobia.”

Elibiary further charged some “white identity/privilege types” have a problem with a “black president” and “brown Mexicans.”

“If #TeaParty wants US revived then we must swing Blue seats Red & that is only achievable thru Libertarianism, not Christianist Xenophobia,” Elibiary tweeted.

Elibiary identified WND as falling into his definition of “Christianist.”

“WND certainly would often times fall in this camp as well as perhaps a subset of Christianists that political scientists refer to as ‘Christian Zionists’ because of its foreign policy worldview through a dispensationalist end-time theology.”

WND’s Aaron Klein

Klein, who has written for WND since 2004, replied that he is Jewish and not Christian.

Elibiary wrote back saying he assumed Klein was Jewish “with the last name of Klein and your demeanor in (sic) video I saw of you on Fox. But I also know WND (sic) ubber Christian.”

Klein inquired, “What about my demeanor on Fox would say I am Jewish?”

Elibiary responded that “most Jews are less alarmist, more reserved. Most Christianists go overboard trying to emotionally sway their audience.”

‘Persecuted Christians incited Muslims’

Last month, Elibiary, who was appointed to the Department of Homeland Security Advisory Council by then-secretary Janet Napolitano in 2010, tweeted that he was reappointed and even promoted.

His tea party remarks are not the first time the DHS adviser’s tweets landed him in hot water.

Last month, he used his Twitter profile to defend the Muslim Brotherhood while accusing Egypt’s persecuted Christian minority of inciting against Islam, as WND reported.

Elibiary is a strong supporter of the radical Islamist theologian who calls for “war” with the non-Muslim world and whose teachings inspired and continue to govern al-Qaida and Islamic terrorist organizations worldwide.

As WND reported, he spoke at a conference that honored the anti-U.S. founder of the Iranian Islamic revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini.

Elibiary has strongly criticized the government’s persecution of fundraisers for Hamas and is a defender of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

He fervently endorses the teachings of Egyptian writer Sayyid Qutb, who is widely considered the father of the modern Islamic terrorist movement. Osama bin Laden and jihadist groups worldwide rely on Qutb for their fatwas and ideology.

Elibiary, meanwhile, has criticized the U.S. government’s prosecution and conviction of the Holy Land Foundation and five former officials for providing more than $12 million to Hamas, depicting the case as a defeat for the United States.

He wrote an op-ed in the Dallas Morning News suggesting the convictions were part of a U.S. government policy of “denying our civil liberties and privacy at home” while pursuing anti-terror policies that have “left thousands of Americans dead, tens of thousands maimed, trillions of taxpayer dollars squandered and our homeland more vulnerable than ever.”

Elibiary sent out a series of tweets that Coptic leaders found offensive last month. The tweets appeared to chastise the Coptic community for lobbying on behalf of their relatives in Egypt. He targeted them because they had aligned themselves with conservative groups that he called “Islamophobic.”

Elibiary personally attacked Michael Meunier, president of Egypt’s al-Haya Party, two days earlier after Meunier spoke with The Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT) about Elibiary’s earlier offensive tweets against the Copts.

Meunier denounced Elibiary’s personal attack, saying the issue had nothing to do with Islamophobia – but that Elibiary threw out a straw man to protect the totalitarian Muslim Brotherhood.

“If you look at him you can definitely see that he is a sympathizer of the Brotherhood,” Meunier said. “If you are in the Brotherhood you don’t have a card. The guy put up the sign for R4BIA [on his Twitter account], a symbol for people who burn churches and kill people.”

Brotherhood defenders are trying to smear their critics as anti-Muslim bigots, rather than people concerned about Brotherhood violence and repression, Meunier said. “He has a grudge against my activism, my spending two months in Washington, highlighting the vicious activities of the Muslim Brotherhood.”

R4BIA takes its name from Cairo’s Rabia ad-Alawiya Square, where hundreds of Muslim Brotherhood protesters were killed in armed clashes with Egyptian security forces in August.

The #R4BIA platform includes a litany of principles that run in open opposition to Western values. It invokes concepts such as: “pure martyrdom”; “unification of the Muslim World”; “the end of Zionists”; “the birth of a new movement for freedom and justice”; “justice for everyone against rotten Islamic values”; “the end of oil sheikhs”; and “the end of capitalists.”

“Western concepts such as democracy, human rights, freedom, equality and right to life, often exercised in a double standard, have utterly collapsed in Palestine, Syria, Bosnia and lastly in Egypt. With the spirit of the Rabia sign, these and similar concepts will be reinterpreted based on Islamic principles,” the section “How did R4BIA emerge?” says.

In a Twitter exchange with the IPT, Elibiary said that he has a nuanced view of the Muslim Brotherhood.

But does his “nuance” include a private endorsement of the #R4BIA movement’s stated goals? Elibiary is not talking despite several invitations by the IPT on Twitter to sit down in person and talk about his views on R4BIA and other issues despite his challenge for dialog.

The R4BIA platform page makes extensive positive references to Sayyid Qutb, a Muslim Brotherhood leader executed in 1966 who explicitly called for violent jihad against infidels; his books are replete with massive anti-Semitic and anti-Christian dogma and conspiracies such as the Jews’ control of world finance.

He seemed perplexed when others questioned him about Qutb’s extremism, telling one questioner he was “curious” about the label.

Qutb called on Muslims to fight non-Muslims unless they pay the jizya or poll tax. That’s a tribute given by non-Muslims to Muslims in exchange for allowing them to practice their religion and keep their lives safe. Qutb also advocated using violenceagainst those who do not convert to Islam.

In the IPT’s new documentary, “The Grand Deception,” former Brotherhood member Abdurrahman Muhammad explains that even universal principles such as ‘justice’ have a different meaning to the Brotherhood than it does for Americans. Justice in the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood’s eyes, Muhammad says, only exists when a state is ruled as a theocracy under Islamic law.

“We will never have justice until we have an Islamic state because whoever doesn’t rule by what Allah has revealed is an oppressor,” Muhammad says in the film, explaining Muslim Brotherhood thought.

Brotherhood apologists such as Elibiary attempt to define the Brotherhood as “moderate.” Yet Rafik Habib, a Coptic Christian Brotherhood apologist whom Elibiary respects, told American diplomats that even the “left-wing” of the Islamist group were not “moderates” in a Western sense. He said their goal was a “religious state where Sharia is applied to all aspects of life.”

Elibiary did not reply when the IPT asked him if he was willing to condemn extremist and racist statements and actions by Muslim Brotherhood leaders. These included threats of expelling the Copts if they did not accept Sharia, Muslim Brotherhood’s Supreme Guide Mohamed Badie’s description of Jews as the sons of “apes” and “pigs,” and Qutb’s violent statements about Muslim relations with non-Muslims.